It's hard for me to believe, but my younger brother Alexander started college this year. He's studying computer programming, which is something that I know a little bit about. I thought that it might be fun for us to do a mini-hackathon together as learning experience for him, and a fun personal challenge for me. We would try our hardest to go from "nothing" to "app" over the course of a single day.
He loved the idea.
Alexander suggested that we could build a Simon clone game, which sounded perfect to me. Just enough complexity to be challenging while still being realistic for our timeframe. He arrived early on a Sunday, and we got right to work.
First we discussed what we'd like the app's features to be:
That's English, we promise
Then we put together a rough technical outline idea of what classes, methods, and properties we'd need:
A hackathon affords no time for writing neatly
And by the end of the day, I think that we were both really happy with the result:
Our game scales properly for all screen sizes from an iPhone 4s to an iPad Air, works in portrait or landscape, has sound effects, stat tracking, and is genuinely a blast to play. And by the end of the day, Alexander was writing code in Swift like he had been doing it his whole life, and pushing and pulling from git like an old pro.
Not bad for a day's work.
Simon Grid by Alexander Kaump is available now for free on the iOS App Store. Go check it out!